Web development

Developing for the web allows you to provide content for the word's most popular application platform and document distribution network. Rust's async I/O system allows you to build highly concurrent server applications, its WebAssembly compiler target makes it possible to write applications that run within the browser, and the crates.io library repository provides reusable libraries for most web standards and framework needs.

History
Rust was first publicly announced to the world as part of "Project Servo," a research project at Mozilla, the non-profit behind the Firefox web browser. Servo is a research project to design and implement a web browser for highly multithreaded computers, and is implemented primarily in Rust. Rust and Servo were mostly designed and implemented together up until Rust's 1.0 release, and both of them provide feedback for each other. Some well-isolated parts of Servo, like its implementation of CSS, are now being used in Firefox.

After Rust was announced and crates.io was set up, the stage was set for a more well-rounded set of libraries to be developed, particularly for web servers. [ DESCRIBE HISTORY OF hyper, actix, and other impactful community libraries ]

Many of Rust's web libraries are maintained by Mozilla under the Servo organization, such as the url crate. Others, like the hyper HTTP implementation, are independent projects. There are also frameworks, such as the Rocket framework, that wrap the lower-level libraries behind an easy-to-use facade for developing applications.

Web server frameworks
[Comparison grid for: Rocket, Actix-Web, and the general set of popular server frameworks ]

WebAssembly
[todo]